The seventies were a time of great stagnation in the music business. The major labels had a death grip on the industry. Album oriented rock stations wouldn't play a record unless it was ultra slick and ultra produced. Zep, Pink Floyd, The Who, the Stones and a handful of other rock giants were taking up 90% of rock airtime, competing with a disco craze for the heart and soul of the American music market. The one thing they had in common was money to spend on production values. There was no alternative scene. If you were a band that was not signed to a major label, you had zero percent chance to hear your music on the radio.

People tend to remember the punk explosion as a time when kids chopped off their hair, spiked it and wore safety pins through their lips---in other words, punk as fashion. But with the Ramones there was no pretense of punk as a fashion movement, or even more ridiculous, punk as a political movement. The Ramones, along with the the Stooges, started a musical revolution of low cost, low production value music---simple, hard and incredible Rock and Roll. I'm not saying Iggy and the Ramones paid for all their recordings themselves with the change they had in their pockets. I'm saying they started a wave of music that could be recorded cheaply and distributed through independent channels. The only remaining piece of the puzzle was the radio stations who would take the risk to play this new music.

Enter college radio. The punk revolution would have been d.o.a in the states without college radio. College radio played the bands that made great music. Once the buzz was out on a band, AOR stations would play them, but they waited for college radio to tell them who was cool.

The Ramones were cool. A punk band that tells you they were not influenced by the Ramones at this stage of the revolution is lying. In punk, all roads lead to the Ramones.

Joey Ramone was larger than life. We mourn him. And more importantly, we owe him. Any garage band who scraped up a few bucks and pressed their own record or CD, sent it to college stations to play, and sold it through the mail, owes him.

Rob